Dada in my dreams; chickens and rabbits

OK, so I had major surgery last week and my body is full of all sorts of drugs including the still much loved and needed painkillers, but I must say my dreams for the last several nights have been quite bizarre...and also more hopeful than I'm allowing in my conscious mind, which I am forcing to "be realistic" but in any case, when I find a Dadaesque poem written on the walls of my bedroom, I have to take notice.

Anyone who has had the pleasure to be familiar with Dr. Ann Faraday's books Dream Power and The Dream Game knows that houses are generally oneself and the rooms in them, different part of oneself. Yesterday, naptime, I was living in this wonderful, mostly white, old-fashioned house on a grassy knoll (hmmm...) which I didn't own but was free to alter to suit my needs. I kept finding rooms I didn't know existed, upstairs, downstairs, all around stairs. One very nice feature about the house on the grassy knoll was that the previous owner had had friendships with many dogs, and those dogs still came to visit every day; we got to be friends without my having to be responsible for them.

By my evening dream, I was repainting the bedroom in my old house white, in preparation for taking some of the walls with me. I realized that my nephew had come into the room when I wasn't there and had painted different parts of the walls vivid primary and jewel colors. At first I thought he had "ruined" it, until I took a closer look. A panel on one wall was painted with the words:
zero equals dada
one is dada minus one
two is dada plus dada
three is dada
four is dada
five is dada minus five.

I'm taking that with me, I thought in my dream.

So, to bracket that dream, I found a video on BoingBoing that you simply must see of two chickens breaking up a fight between two rabbits. I don't have sound on my computer, but i think it goes something like this: Stop it, you bad rabbits! What do you think you're doing? Cut it out right now! How dare you waste my time like this? Don't you know you've interrupted my cluckada? Now, I'm going to stand. right. here. until I know you've stopped. Hhmph!
The White Room: Katherine Dutiel

Crickets

Twice in one week I heard/read what I thought was commonly accepted knowledge presented as new information. Are we reinventing ourselves and our world? Is everything old new again? Or is it just me?

Maybe dreams have meaning after all! That's the conclusion Rebecca Cathcart comes to in her July 3 NYTimes article "Winding Through ‘Big Dreams’ Are the Threads of Our Lives". Haven't we known that for 10,000 years? If we have forgotten that, the forgetting is very recent.

On ABC news, Charles Gibson announced that crickets can accurately tell the temperature. This is new? If we didn't learn "the formula" as kids, surely that background awareness that becomes part of intuition has told us that crickets chirp more frequently when it's hot and slower when it's cooler.

Some years the bails of hay with which I've mulched my garden have come loaded with cricket seeds. I notice them when they are less than a match head in size and simply everywhere. A week later they are fewer and bigger, and thus for every week that follows through the summer and early fall.

Little crickets have tiny, high voices.
Big crickets have smooth, middle voices.

By October I seem to be following the fate of a sole cricket, the only one left in the world, for all I know. Each night I listen, and then I forget to listen, and somewhere in that forgetting the cricket falls silent.

So here is the formula: count the number of times a cricket chirps in 14 seconds and add the number 38. You will have the exact farenheit temperature.

Artist: MARY ANNE Z. O'SULLIVAN